Debunking 4 Myths of SEO Writing

There are myths surrounding SEO writing that can hurt your chances of taking a good spot in search engine results pages (SERP) when believed.

Misconceptions about this effective SEO marketing strategy can hinder your website’s full potential in attracting more traffic and ranking high in search engines.

Here are the truths behind four popular SEO myths to help you identify what is really helpful and what is not.
1. Publishing SEO article is futile if your Google PageRank is low.
Low Google PageRank also means low ranking, but that does not mean keyword-optimized contents won’t help you change that.

Newly-launched and just-recently optimized websites naturally have lower chances of ranking high, but that can change by continually building your content.

First, a page that appears to be a perfect match for keyword research will rank high regardless if the overall website PageRank is low.

Google and other search engines still greatly rely on keyword research in guiding their crawlers to find the closest and most credible sources of information online.

You can still top the SERP for very specific researches that match your article very well.

Second, content relevance that serves as one of the primary criteria for ranking is greatly affected by the volume of relevant contents you publish in your site.

Thus, you can slowly climb the SERP by continuously building content. It won’t happen in an instant, but it does help.

While your SEO marketing efforts are yet to pay off, you can also employ other online marketing strategies, such as social media marketing, email marketing, article marketing, online advertising, among others.

SEO marketing is just one piece of the picture, so you still have other complementing options.

2. Having pure HTML versions of your articles and sitemap will catapult you to the top of SERP.

Javascript and Flash are not well-read by crawlers unlike HTML, so it is preferred that you keep HTML versions of your articles and sitemap in another section (like when the menu stays on top and the sitemap stays at the bottom of the page).

This practice increases your chance of ranking high, but there is no guarantee to that.

High rank is the result of the collective efforts of various SEO and other online marketing efforts.

HTML structuring can improve your discoverability, but it will not catapult you to the top of SERP alone, so do not expect too much.

3. Meta descriptions are essential in site indexing.
Meta descriptions are helpful in discovering websites to index, but they do not affect ranking at all.

Meta descriptions are the additional one-line snippets or descriptions that you see under a website name/URL after doing a search on search engines.

This usually consists of related meta tags that can help crawlers identify what a page is all about. Many SEO writers really allot time in writing meta descriptions for each page in a website in the hopes of ranking better, but it is time not well spent.

Search engines nowadays no longer give credit to meta tags comprised of meta keywords and meta descriptions even at the slightest.

They do not help you rank, but they can help readers identify interesting websites to open.

Nevertheless, niche search engines (more like indexing sites for specific niches) reportedly still put weight on meta tags. It is a matter of deciding to sacrifice your time for something that has little effect in your marketing efforts.